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There is much to be said for temptation in two dimensions. A menu, stuck against the window of a restaurant or framed on the wall outside, calls out to our salivary glands and draws us over the threshold. The same goes for posters at a cinema: their primary purpose, no doubt, is to lure us into the dark. But there’s a difference. Seldom is a menu an object of beauty, whereas the history of movie posters is strewn with images so luscious, or so startling, that they stand proud in their own right and even risk eclipsing the product that they are meant to hawk. The promise of the apple, dangled before us, can be juicier than the flesh.

Getting hold of that history, these days, can be a costly business. In November, at Heritage Auctions, in Dallas, a poster for the 1938 rerelease of “King Kong” went for $68,750. Some brave bidder spent more than a hundred grand on a “Dracula” from 1947. Talk about blood money. Every art form has its grails, and it seems that the holiest of relics, in this field, would be an original poster for “Metropolis” (1927). At auction, in 2005, one sold for six hundred and ninety thousand dollars. Just to be greedy, MOMA has two of the damn things. Neither is currently on show.

New Yorkers with lighter wallets need not despair. There are a number of troves for the treasure seeker, none more enticing than Posteritati, a store on Centre Street, which has been in operation as a business since 1995. A browse through its recent acquisitions, online, led me swiftly to a bunch of Antonionis from the early nineteen-sixties—“L’Avventura,” “L’Eclisse,” and a sumptuous “La Notte,” with the face of Jeanne Moreau drawn in black-and-white save for her candy-pink kisser. Or how about a 1973 Japanese poster of “Charade,” featuring a head-scarfed Audrey Hepburn against a backdrop of blazing blue, for four hundred and fifty bucks? A steal. It would be like having a patch of sky on your bedroom wall.

Whether you are buying, researching, or resigned to simply dreaming, the plethora of choice in the poster market is enough to turn the mildest fan into a drunken Aladdin, stumbling helplessly around the cave. One tip: pick an actor, a director, a period, or a country of origin, tie them together, and follow the thread of your taste. Anyone in need of extra Hepburn, for example (and who isn’t?), is advised to scout beyond the obvious borders. I am lucky enough to possess an American poster for “Funny Face,” from 1957, with not one but two Audreys—her head and shoulders in scarlet, plus her full-length figure, black-clad, and blissfully lost in a dance. If I had the means, however, I would supplement that with a 1964 poster for “Roman Holiday” from what was then Czechoslovakia, with “Audrey Hepburnová,” as she is listed, superimposed on an overhead shot of Rome in a merry modernist patchwork; or else a Polish invitation to the same film, from 1959, which transforms her into a red-skirted sprite from a children’s picture book.

Here’s a joke: for the freest and the most fantastical posters of all, you can’t beat an oppressed state. In postwar Communist Poland, under the auspices of the Ministry of Art and Culture, designers were pretty much let off the leash. Many artistic enterprises, including theatre, opera, and the circus were promoted by their imaginings, but, for sheer nerve, cinema took the crown. Why so? Perhaps because of the culture clash involved. The pure products of America and its capitalist corporations, such as Warner Bros. and Twentieth Century Fox, banged against the lyrical (and notably anti-prudish) wit that was permitted to flourish, somehow, in the Soviet bloc. Official Hollywood posters, especially in the Reagan years, were spurned in favor of surreal homegrown imagery, most of it only obliquely connected to the movies in question.

A case in point would be “Working Girl,” Mike Nichols’s 1988 comedy of office politics. Some American viewers were pulled into it by a boring—and slightly embarrassing—poster of Harrison Ford, smirking in a suit, while a loyal Melanie Griffith clings to his shoulder and Sigourney Weaver, as befits her role of nemesis, gives a wicked smile. No such prosaic and plot-heavy come-ons for the Polish release; instead, an inky image of a man’s head cut diagonally in half, with a serrated edge. Up the resulting staircase walks a tiny female figure in black tights. As a rule, examining Polish posters of this ilk, and trying to guess which films are being publicized, is a deliciously difficult sport. A man trapped in the beak of a giant crow? Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours.” A blindfolded head, with a flickering green tongue? “Broadcast News.” A pair of telephone handsets, poking out of robes and exchanging toothy grins? Why, “Terms of Endearment,” of course.

What links the above is that all were begotten by one man—Andrzej Pągowski, born in 1953. (In 1992, he became an art director at Polish Playboy. His first cover showed a paint-splattered bunny silhouette.) For the heartfelt poster nerd, this is where collecting grows most focussed, in the pursuit of works by an individual artist. Swooping away from Eastern and Central Europe, and back to the free world, you could opt for Saul Bass, whose crookedly angled posters for “Vertigo” and “The Man with the Golden Arm” have been widely reproduced—although, be warned, an original will not come cheap. Then, there is Alberto Vargas, who, before he, too, migrated to Playboy, created posters for pre-Code melodramas that enshrine the audacity of the age. How his poster for “The Sin of Nora Moran,” with its uncluttered, near-naked depiction of the heroine, ever appeared on a public wall, in 1933, without getting torn down, I have no idea.

Some deserving names, though, are still obscure, and that is why an exhibition at Poster House, on West Twenty-third Street, running until April 12th, is to be welcomed with gusto. Here, in the first American museum that is dedicated solely to the art of the poster, is your chance to inspect the output of a master. The show bears the title, “Art for Art House: The Posters of Peter Strausfeld,” to which most people will respond, “Peter who?”

Strausfeld was born in Cologne, Germany, in 1910. Nourished on a love of Expressionist art, and having designed work that was critical of Nazism, he left his native land in 1938. Safe in the haven of Britain, he found himself interned, in the early nineteen-forties, as an “enemy alien”—a term applied to almost anyone, including Jewish refugees, who had fled from countries with which Britain was then at war. Strausfeld, like many internees, was taken to the Isle of Man, off the northwest coast of England. The communities that arose there became, to a near-comical degree, temporary cultural strongholds, crammed with artists, musicians, medics, and academics. Among them was Kurt Schwitters, one of the great collagists of the century.

It was on the Isle of Man that Strausfeld met an Austrian film producer and director named George Hoellering—a fruitful encounter, by any standard. Once released, the two men made animated films for the British war effort (so much for being enemies, or aliens), and then, in 1944, Hoellering took charge of the Academy, a cinema on London’s Oxford Street. A movie theatre—or, at any rate, an arena for the viewing of projected images—had existed on the site since 1906, under a variety of names, with an increasing emphasis on European fare throughout the nineteen-thirties. That reputation was fortified during Hoellering’s reign, which lasted until his death, in 1980, and crystallized by an unforgettable series of posters. They were displayed not just outside the cinema but around London, not least in Underground stations, and they confirmed the Academy’s status as a mecca for the adventurous moviegoer. The posters were the work of Strausfeld.

The Poster House show is founded on the private collection of Michael Lellouche, who, in his introduction to the accompanying book, points out an extraordinary symbiosis. “Hoellering never produced a poster without Strausfeld,” Lellouche writes, “and Strausfeld never designed a poster for anyone but Hoellering.” No Renaissance Pope could command such exclusive loyalty. Strausfeld did teach at Brighton College of Art (later part of Brighton Polytechnic), on the south coast of England, for many years, but the fruits of his labors for the Academy are the cause of his meticulous appeal.

Photographic imagery forms no part of a typical Strausfeld poster, even though he often based his designs on production stills. His medium was the linocut print—clean, strong, and scornful of embellishment. Every edge is hard, every shadow is hatched; colors are kept to a minimum, but those which are deployed make a formidable impact. There is none of the delicate feathering of a drypoint etching, and, because linoleum is bereft of knots and rings, there is no grain, such as you might expect in a woodcut. Information is delivered with a shock. Consider the 1973 poster for Claude Chabrol’s “Red Wedding,” which consists of two staring figures and three hues: black, white, and blood. Above the title are the words “Academy Cinema Two, Oxford Street - 437 5129.” Offhand, how many works of art do you know that give a phone number? Imagine Edward Hopper adding a Zip Code to “Nighthawks,” for anyone who couldn’t sleep, wanted a cup of coffee, and didn’t know where to go.

If poster art is a mass medium, here is the punchy exception: images made by one person, for one movie, at one cinema. That’s not unique—starting in 1918, Josef Fenneker designed posters for the Marmorhaus, in Berlin, some of them frighteningly stark—but it’s uncommon, and it means that most people who visit the show at the Poster House will be heading into unknown territory. Print lovers, I suspect, will be more at home than movie buffs; the graphic confidence of Strausfeld, at once forthright and haunting, suggests nothing so much as “Intimacies,” the wonderful sequence of ten woodcuts that was produced by Félix Vallotton in 1897-98. Each of those has a title (“The Lie,” “Five O’Clock,” “Money,” and so forth), and together they fuse into an early graphic novel, taut with frustration and desire. From there to the Strausfeld poster for Chabrol’s “The Butcher,” in which an exhausted couple lean on each other with closed eyes, or for Luis Buñuel’s “Tristana,” which sets the profile of Catherine Deneuve sharply against a flat plane of grass green, is really not much of a leap.

The Academy, in its prime, expanded to three screens, and the programming both mirrored and fostered an impassioned new interest in foreign films. In order to summon up the eagerness of that vanished era, you need only cast your eyes over the names that are writ large on Strausfeld’s posters. Buñuel, Bergman, Éric Rohmer, Satyajit Ray, Miloš Forman, and plenty of Andrzej Wajda and Miklós Jancsó—the Hungarian doyen of the long take. To the seasoned poster-gatherer, what’s remarkable about this list is the fact that it consists of directors. For any publicity department in Hollywood’s heyday, that would have been unthinkable; it was stars, and stars alone, who were guaranteed to inveigle the masses.

Take a representative poster from 1938. The space is filled by the face of Bette Davis, then by her name, and only then by the title, “Jezebel.” Way below, in much smaller type, comes the name of the director, William Wyler, who to worshippers of Davis was no more important than her chauffeur. The same is true today, more than critics care to admit. If you’d accosted fans of Tom Cruise as they came out of “Top Gun: Maverick” and asked them who had directed it, how many would have given the correct answer, “Joseph Kosinski”? Eight per cent? Ten?

Now and then, at the Academy, the rule was broken, and the star came first. Hence the Strausfeld poster for “The Lacemaker,” in 1977, which was topped not by the name of the director, Claude Goretta, but by that of Isabelle Huppert. The image is stuck fast in my memory. In England, at that time, I rarely ventured up to London—a city that, then as now, I dreaded and disliked. I had no friends there, and no money to spend; the only things that attracted me were the National Gallery (which was, and remains, free to visit) and movie theatres, the Academy above all. Purely on the strength of Strausfeld’s poster, I made a pilgrimage to see “The Lacemaker.” It was rated AA, which meant that you had to be fourteen or over to watch it. Oh, the thrill!

Still out of bounds to me, alas, were X movies. In Britain, the rating did not automatically give off the same perspiring whiff of seediness that it did in the United States. Many fine films were deemed too extreme for anyone under eighteen, including several that earned a linocut from Strausfeld. Among them were Forman’s “A Blonde in Love,” Marco Bellocchio’s “Fists in the Pocket,” and Jean-Luc Godard’s “Vivre Sa Vie”—or, to use its clumsy British rendering, “It’s My Life.” The poster for Godard’s film is a masterpiece, rivalling the clarity of the movie. Anna Karina, the star, gazes off to the left. (A reversal of her actual pose, in the scene from which Strausfeld is working.) Her sleeves, her bob, and her lashes are conveyed in crisp black. Her hairband and her eyeshadow are of baby blue. And her lips, like the wooden partition on which she leans, are as red as Beaujolais.

Yet that is not the end of the affair. The poster is honored with a coda. It shows up on a wall, unremarked, and shorn of its lettering, in a later and sterner Godard film, “2 or 3 Things I Know About Her.” Is the director paying more handsome homage to Strausfeld, or to himself? Possibly the latter, given that Godard had already played the game elsewhere, in “Contempt,” where the side of a building is plastered with big, scrappy posters for Howard Hawks’s “Hatari!,” Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” Rossellini’s “Vanina Vanini,” and “Questa È la Mia Vita”—otherwise known as “Vivre Sa Vie.” Godard, in short, is gluing himself into the pantheon, and thereby preparing the way for Quentin Tarantino, who cheerfully decorates the interiors in “Pulp Fiction” with posters for the kinds of raunchy, rackety B movies (“Sorority Girl,” “Machine Gun Kelly”) that he reveres. Once you start exploring the topic of movie posters inside movies, it must be said, you don’t just dive down a rabbit hole. You enter a warren.

Whether the movie poster will survive, as a minor but compelling art form, is open to debate. The fewer of us who choose to go out to the cinema, the less call there will be for posters and billboards to guide us there. A Strausfeld is no aid to streaming. Yet the fascination, gilded with nostalgia, is unlikely to fade, because the poster itself is a printed paradox: a static and heraldic portent of pictures that move. That is why you should make the effort to see the Strausfelds at Poster House—“unclassifiable images combining absolute freshness and quiet power,” in the words of Michael Lellouche. Peter Strausfeld, by all accounts a modest soul, died in 1980, and the Academy Cinema closed forever in 1986, leaving Oxford Street to dwindle into the purgatorial strip that it is today. The moviegoing banquet may be over, but the menus linger on. ♦

Early on the morning of May 29, 1660, flanked by twenty thousand armed men, King Charles II arrived in London to retake the throne. Bells rang out and ships fired their guns to mark the occasion. It was Charles’s thirtieth birthday. England had been without a king for eleven years, after Charles’s father was beheaded, on a temporary wooden platform outside Banqueting House, part of the palace of Whitehall. But the country’s experiment as a republic was over. King Charles II was welcomed warmly. Bonfires were lit. Fountains flowed with wine and “Divers maidens,” dressed in “white waistcoats and crimson petticoats, and other ornaments of triumph and rejoicing,” asked the permission of the Lord Mayor to join the royal procession. Dusk was falling when the King finally entered the Banqueting House and received the formal offer of the throne.

Charles’s retinue included his twenty-six-year-old brother, James, the Duke of York. During the Civil War, James had been captured by Parliament. Aged fourteen, he escaped, from St. James’s Palace, during a game of hide-and-seek and fled to mainland Europe, where he became a soldier. James was brave but blunt. “He was not dull; but he was cut off. His mind was isolated,” Hilaire Belloc wrote, in a sympathetic character study, in 1928. “Complexity did not bewilder him, rather he missed it altogether.”

Spare princes need something to do. King Charles put the Duke of York in charge of the Navy. Five years earlier, English forces had captured Jamaica, which became the country’s portal to the Caribbean and its emerging American colonies. The Duke of York liked bold ideas. His cousin, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, had heard of “a firm rock of gold of a great bigness” while exploring the Gambia River, on the coast of West Africa, a decade earlier. In December, 1660, James launched the first expedition of the Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading into Africa, to search for gold mines. The Duke also instructed his men to trade for “Negroes, hides and other goods” with Spanish and Portuguese outposts along the way.

The Royal Adventurers found no gold. But they returned to the Duke with a business case for entering—and mastering—the transatlantic slave trade instead. English sea captains, with royal patronage, had been trafficking African people to the Caribbean and the Chesapeake Bay for decades, but on an ad-hoc basis. In January, 1663, the second charter of the Royal Adventurers granted the company a monopoly for the “buying and selling bartering and exchanging of for and with any Negroes Slaves Goods wares and Merchandize whatsoever.” The same month, the Duke of York promised to supply three thousand Africans per year to Barbados and other islands in the Caribbean, at a cost of seventeen pounds per head. The company’s seal carried the Duke’s coat of arms and a Latin motto that meant “by royal patronage, trade flourishes, by trade the realm.” In time, what became known as the Royal African Company shipped more enslaved men, women, and children in the transatlantic slave trade than any other institution.

The Duke was the company’s governor, largest shareholder, and guiding spirit. Meetings often took place at his lodgings in Whitehall. James continued in his role as the governor of the Royal African Society when he ascended the throne, as James II, in 1685, and until he was sent into exile for a final time, three years later.

By then, customs duties from sugar and tobacco—produced by England’s slave economies in the Americas—accounted for a third of the Crown’s revenues. The Royal African Company had acquired forts, ships, and the necessary infrastructure to traffic more than a hundred thousand people from one continent to another. In the seventeen-twenties, long after James’s death, John Atkins, a naval surgeon, visited the Gold Coast and was struck by the initials that were branded on enslaved people’s skin. They “mark them still DY,” he wrote. “Duke of York, to perpetuate the ignominy of his headship to that trade.”

The Duke of York’s devotion to the slave trade stands out in Brooke Newman’s new study, “The Crown’s Silence: The Hidden History of the British Monarchy and Slavery in the Americas.” There are other episodes of direct royal complicity, too: in June, 1712, Queen Anne celebrated her negotiation of the Asiento de Negros, a thirty-year contract to supply some five thousand adult males to the Spanish Empire, in a speech to the Houses of Parliament.

But for much of the rest of the time that Britain was involved in trafficking African people—a roughly three-hundred-year period between the reigns of Queen Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria—the Royal Family’s involvement was mediated by companies and officials. Newman, a historian at Virginia Commonwealth University, is dogged, and her research is important. The conclusion that emerges is that transatlantic slavery was foundational, and known to be so, during the westward expansion of the British royal realm. As Daniel Defoe observed in 1713, “No African trade, no Negroes; no Negroes, no sugars, gingers, indigoes etc; no sugars, etc., no islands; no islands, no continent; no continent, no trade.”

Two silences permeate Newman’s book: the silence of the Crown and the silence of the trafficked. Video et taceo. “I see and keep silent,” Elizabeth I used to say. William IV, who visited New York and the Caribbean in the seventeen-eighties, as a young midshipman in the Navy, was the only monarch to witness Britain’s slave economy in operation. (He viewed Jamaica “with infinite satisfaction” and, along with his six brothers, opposed the abolition of the slave trade in 1807.) The views of William’s father, George III, were less sure. Left among his papers were notes that drew on Montesquieu’s “Spirit of the Laws,” from 1748, in which George described slavery as “an inhuman custom wantonly practiced by the most enlightened polite nations in the world.” But knowing that something is wrong is not the same as doing something to stop it. During George’s reign, the British state purchased some thirteen thousand African men to serve in his Army. George ended up adopting Montesquieu’s inscrutable, circular reasoning for his own: “The true origin for the right of slavery must be found in the nature of things.”

While the country’s princes and princesses had little to say about enslaved people, they loved having them around. Newman’s book is dotted with paintings that show royal bodies juxtaposed with owned, Black ones: nameless grooms and female attendants acquired to ornament, and accentuate, the existing nature of things. “My greatness is from on high,” reads the swirling banner above the top hat of Queen Anne of Denmark, James I’s wife, in a portrait from 1617. Five hunting dogs, a horse, and a liveried Black youth adorn the scene. Later in the century, Nell Gwyn, Charles II’s most famous lover, was portrayed stuffing sausages, her breasts partially exposed, with a Black servant, in a silver collar, waiting at her shoulder. “Gwyn, a commoner and royal mistress, is of higher status than her anonymous enslaved attendant,” Newman writes. “Yet both figures represent commodified bodies available for royal consumption.”

I read Newman’s book last week, while the Crown was contending with the legacy of another people-trafficking operation, this one conducted by Jeffrey Epstein. Again, the royal protagonist was a former Duke of York. Like his predecessor, Prince Andrew (as he used to be) was a brave young serviceman. Aged twenty-two, he flew helicopters during the Falklands War. One of his tasks was to act as a decoy for Argentinian missiles fired at his mother’s Navy. When he left the military, Andrew turned his attention to foreign trade. Between 2001 and 2011, he was the U.K.’s special representative for international trade and investment, travelling the world in search of profit and adventure, with a team of equerries and a six-foot ironing board. The Daily Telegraph nicknamed him “Airmiles Andy.” Of the Queen’s four children, Andrew was considered the direct and entrepreneurial one. In 2014, he set up Pitch@Palace, a chance for startups to network and present their ideas in a royal setting.

He was not dull, but he was cut off. Andrew met Epstein in the late nineties, through Ghislaine Maxwell, the youngest daughter of Robert Maxwell, a former press baron. Epstein and Maxwell promptly became guests at Balmoral, Sandringham, and Windsor Castle. “Have you found me some new inappropriate friends?” someone describing themselves as “The Invisible Man” e-mailed Maxwell, from the “Balmoral Summer Camp for the Royal Family,” in the summer of 2001. On trips across the Atlantic, Andrew stayed at Epstein’s houses in Palm Beach, New York, and on Little St. James, Epstein’s island in the Caribbean. Two women, including Virginia Giuffre, who died by suicide last year, accused the former prince of having sex with them when they were minors, on the island and at Maxwell’s mews house, in London.

During this period, Andrew was making inappropriate friends all over the place. He ensnared himself in relationships with the son of Muammar Qaddafi, the Libyan dictator, and with Tarek Kaituni, a gun smuggler. He reportedly went goose-hunting with Nursultan Nazarbayev, the authoritarian former President of Kazakhstan, whose family later purchased a mansion from him, in Berkshire. But Epstein and Maxwell appear to have occupied a privileged role. According to the latest release of the Epstein files, Andrew would forward confidential briefings about British investment opportunities overseas to the financier within minutes of receiving them. He described Epstein and Maxwell as “my US family.” Sarah Ferguson, Andrew’s ex-wife and the former Duchess of York, called Epstein the brother she had always wished for. “When are you going to employ me,” she wrote to him, in September, 2010, a year after he was released from prison for soliciting sex from a child.

Andrew has stayed silent about his relationship with Epstein and his victims, with one calamitous exception. In November, 2019, he gave an interview to the BBC, during which he denied any sexual misconduct and insisted that he broke off the friendship in 2010, after Epstein’s conviction. The former Duke did not regret the relationship, however, because he learned a lot about the world. “You have to remember that I was transitioning out of the Navy at the time,” he said. “The Navy—it’s a pretty isolated business.” He never wondered what all the people in Epstein’s houses were doing. “I live in an institution at Buckingham Palace which has members of staff walking around all the time,” he said. “I don’t wish to appear grand, but there were a lot of people who were walking around Jeffrey Epstein’s house. As far as I was aware, they were staff.”

Since the interview, Andrew has refused at least eight requests from U.S. prosecutors and Congress to testify in its investigations of Epstein’s crimes. In 2022, he reached a financial settlement with Giuffre, in which he denied wrongdoing. (Last November, after the publication of Giuffre’s posthumous memoir, Andrew was stripped of his titles: Prince, the Duke of York, and His Royal Highness.) We now know that even when Andrew did open his mouth, it was not to tell the truth. E-mails show that he did not break off his friendship with Epstein in 2010. When a deeply incriminating photograph of Andrew, Giuffre, and Maxwell from 2001—when Giuffre was seventeen—was published, in 2011, he wrote to Epstein the following day, “Don’t worry about me! It would seem we are in this together and will have to rise above it!” He signed off, “Otherwise keep in close touch and we’ll play some more soon!!!!”

Unlike the portraits in Newman’s book, which were painted to glorify their sitters, many of the images in the Epstein files have a queasy, destabilizing aspect. The nature of the power that is recorded there exists both inside and outside the frame. Were the photographs made for prurience, to objectify the victims, or to blackmail the guilty? Presumably all three. In the BBC interview, Andrew questioned whether the image of him with Giuffre was real. “Nobody can prove whether or not that photograph has been doctored,” he said. (The latest release of the Epstein files includes an e-mail from Maxwell, from 2015, that indicates the picture was genuine.) The portrait of the Prince and the trafficking victim—his hand on her waist; her heartbreaking smile—with Maxwell, the human factor, standing by, will always be the defining image of the Royal Family’s involvement in the Epstein case.

But a triptych of photographs that were released last month, showing Andrew apparently on the floor of Epstein’s New York town house, have a terrible directness. He kneels sockless, in jeans and a white polo shirt, while a woman lies cruciform and inert. In two of the photos, her head is either cropped or out of shot entirely. His eyes meet the camera dead-on. He puts his hands where he wants. These are images of royal consumption.

“The Crown’s Silence” has had a mixed reception in the British media. Newman, in her book, challenges the present King Charles and the government to “acknowledge and seek to redress” the injustice of transatlantic slavery. (For years, the Royal Family has spoken of its sorrow rather than of its responsibility.) Newman’s work has been welcomed by reformers and those who have been arguing, for years, in favor of British reparations to societies that have borne the legacy of its slaving activities. According to the Guardian, Buckingham Palace does not comment on books, although a source told the newspaper that the King took the matter “profoundly seriously.”

Conservative critics have been more astringent. Both the Times of London and the Daily Telegraph reviewed Newman’s book poorly, with an air of anti-woke ennui, accusing her of imposing contemporary moral standards on the vices of the past. Writing in the Times, Yuan Yi Zhu, a research fellow at Policy Exchange, a conservative think tank, chastised Newman for her “failure to distinguish the person of the monarch from the crown.” In the Telegraph, Simon Heffer described Newman’s book as “untranslated from the original American” and definitely not worth reading. “We can certainly regret that all of this happened,” Heffer concluded. “Our present King, however, has nothing to apologise for at all.”

In a way, the conservative reaction to Newman’s book has mirrored the official response to Andrew’s involvement in the life of Jeffrey Epstein. It is to insist on the distinction between the individual and the Crown. For the past fifteen years, since the photograph of the former Duke with Giuffre was first published, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, as he is now known, has been the subject of a prolonged, experimental de-royalling: to find out if a prince can be excised from the monarchy and the monarchy excised from him. During this time, he has lost his government job, his military titles, his royal income. More than two hundred charities shed him as their patron. Pitch@Palace folded. Andrew has left the Order of the Garter, which was founded by Edward III, in 1348, and had his banner removed from the chapel at Windsor Castle. Last week, a moving van transported Andrew’s possessions from his home in Windsor’s Royal Lodge to a farm on the King’s Sandringham estate, after he was photographed, disconsolate, riding a horse.

The attempt to expunge Andrew and his sins from the Royal Family is interesting insofar as it is doomed. It is Lady Macbeth, washing her hands: “Out, damned spot! Out, I say!” That is because Andrew will always be royal, in the same way that slavery will always be royal. If blood confers power, it confers other things, too. Continuity is not a feature of the monarchy. It is what the monarchy is. In 2013, the novelist Hilary Mantel gave a lecture entitled “Royal Bodies,” at the British Museum. “In looking at royalty, we are always looking at what is archaic, what is mysterious by its nature, and my feeling is that it will only ever half reveal itself,” Mantel said. “Royal persons are both gods and beasts. They are persons but they are suprapersonal, carriers of a bloodline: at the most basic, they are breeding stock, collections of organs.”

Princes and princesses understood this for centuries. They are revered one minute and dissected the next. “We are ready at any moment to rip away the veil of respect, and treat royal persons in an inhuman way, making them not more than us but less than us, not really human at all,” Mantel said. Andrew understands this now. They all do, in their bones. When James, the erstwhile Duke of York and slaving pioneer, died in exile, outside Paris, in 1701, his brain was given to the Scots College in Paris, his heart to a convent in Chaillot, and his intestines divided between the English Jesuit College at Saint-Omer and the parish church of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. It is not a coincidence that, through the centuries, people who are objectified for their bodies and blood set out to objectify others in turn, whether through the ministrations of the Royal African Company or Jeffrey Epstein’s e-mail account. It is not a mistake to draw a line from that Duke of York to this Duke of York. It is what the Crown asks us to do every day. It is simply to accept the premise that there are Dukes of York at all. ♦

For much of the past six months, Peter Mandelson, the veteran British politician, has been holed up in a rented country house in a picturesque valley in Wiltshire, about a hundred miles west of London. He retreated there after the British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, fired him, last September, from his post as the U.K.’s Ambassador to the United States, following the release of e-mails by the Department of Justice that showed Mandelson had retained close ties to Jeffrey Epstein, and pledged his support to him, despite the late financier’s 2008 conviction for soliciting sex from a minor.

Not for the first time in his career, Mandelson was disgraced. And things got a lot worse for him at the end of last month, when the D.O.J. released more e-mails revealing that he wasn’t merely friendly with Epstein: in 2009-10, during Mandelson’s time as a government minister, he passed sensitive government information to Epstein. Referring to the e-mails, Mandelson told a journalist from the Times of London who visited him in Wiltshire that none of them “indicate wrongdoing or misdemeanour on my part.” But he’s now the subject of a police inquiry into whether his leaks amounted to “misconduct in public office”—a criminal offense. And earlier this month, Daisy Cooper, the deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, the third-largest party in the House of Commons, called on the Financial Conduct Authority, Britain’s main financial regulator, to launch an insider-dealing investigation into whether Mandelson “or those he leaked information to profited from access to this market sensitive and confidential material.”

At this stage, there is no evidence that anybody did. There is also no suggestion that Mandelson had anything to do with Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking. But the furor has enveloped Starmer, who appointed Mandelson as Ambassador in 2024. At a meeting with the Labour M.P.s and peers last week, the Prime Minister said that he has no intention of stepping down. But two of his aides who had ties to Mandelson have resigned, and the scandal has raised doubts about his long-term survival in office. It has also added another twist to the Epstein story, illustrating his role as an information hub and informal lobbyist for Wall Street interests.

Last Friday, two House Democrats sent a letter to Mandelson asking him to agree to be interviewed by staff from the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The British press still sometimes refers to him as the Prince of Darkness, a nickname he acquired in the nineteen-eighties, when, as the Labour Party’s young director of communications, he proved to be a ruthless but highly effective political strategist and “spin doctor.” In 1997, Mandelson directed Tony Blair’s victorious campaign for New Labour, which ended eighteen years of Conservative rule, and he was subsequently appointed to the Cabinet. But Mandelson soon proved himself to be a political liability. In December, 1998, he was forced to resign after the Guardian reported that he’d taken an undisclosed home loan from a fellow Labour M.P. who was also a wealthy businessman. The following year, Blair brought Mandelson back into the Cabinet, but he didn’t last long then, either. In January, 2001, he resigned again, this time after being accused of trying to influence a passport application by an Indian businessman who was seeking British citizenship. An independent inquiry found that, in this instance, Mandelson had done nothing wrong. But he couldn’t shed the tinge of scandal or the suspicion that he was overly keen on accumulating money and social status.

It’s not clear when Mandelson’s friendship with Epstein started, but in 2003 he contributed to a book of tributes compiled for the financier’s fiftieth birthday, describing him as “my best pal.” (This was the same book to which Donald Trump appears to have contributed his infamous note and sketch of a naked woman.) In the files, bank documents suggest that in 2003 and 2004 Epstein sent seventy-five thousand dollars, in three payments, to accounts thought to be connected to Mandelson and his longtime partner, Reinaldo Avila da Silva, whom he married in 2023. (After the documents were released, Lord Mandelson said that he has no record or recollection of receiving the payments and didn’t know whether the documents were authentic.)

In 2004, Mandelson went to Brussels as Britain’s commissioner for trade in the European Union. Many observers believed that his days as a major political figure were done, but in October, 2008, as the financial crisis was raging, Gordon Brown, who had succeeded Blair as Labour leader and Prime Minister the previous year, brought Mandelson back from Europe, granted him a life peerage in the House of Lords, and appointed him as business minister. Since Brown and Mandelson had clashed in the past, this appointment came as a surprise. Brown said that “serious people are needed for serious times”: commentators suggested that he valued Mandelson’s political savvy and experience in dealing with foreign governments. The following year, Brown further promoted Mandelson, expanding his department and giving him the honorary title of First Secretary of State.

At the time, bank bailouts, accompanied by emergency measures from central banks, eventually restored calm to the financial markets, but that didn’t curb the public anger at the bankers, who were rightly perceived to be in a no-lose position. When times were good, they made pots of money. When a crisis arose, taxpayers stepped in to save them. On December 9, 2009, Alistair Darling, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced a fifty-per-cent, one-off tax on bankers’ bonuses. Politically, this was a popular move, but in London’s financial district—where many big banks, including some based in the U.S., are situated—it sparked outrage and pushback. In a book about the great financial crisis and its aftermath, Darling recalled how a number of bankers called him up and complained about the bonus tax. The callers included Jamie Dimon, the C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase. “He was very, very angry,” Darling wrote. “He said that his bank bought a lot of UK debt and he wondered if that was now such a good idea. I pointed out that they bought our debt because it was a good business deal for them. He went on to say they were thinking of building a new office in London but they had to reconsider that now.”

Reading Mandelson’s e-mails, it appears that Epstein, too, was a part of the pressure campaign. He had a long-standing relationship with JPMorgan Chase, which handled many of his financial dealings, and particularly with Jes Staley, who, as the chief executive of the J.P. Morgan investment bank, oversaw the London office. A few days after the announcement of the new tax, Epstein wrote to Mandelson, “any real chance of making the tax only on the cash portion of the bankers’ bonus.” Mandelson replied, “Trying hard to amend as I explained to Jes last night. Treasury digging in but I am on case.” Two days later, evidently referring to Dimon and Darling, Epstein wrote, “should jamie call darling one more time?” Mandelson replied, “yes and mildly threaten.” Later the same day, Mandelson wrote to Epstein again and appeared to indicate that he, himself, had spoken to Darling and got nowhere. “Crazy response from Chancellor. He appears unmovable.”

Darling and the U.K. Treasury resisted the pressure that was brought to bear against them and went ahead with an unmodified version of the bonus tax. Surprise, surprise, JPMorgan Chase and other big banks survived this outrageous assault upon their prerogatives. But as Faisal Islam, the economics editor of BBC News, wrote, the possibility that this backlash “may have been orchestrated partly via Epstein, with Mandelson emailing advice . . . is staggering.” A spokesperson for JPMorgan Chase declined to comment. In the past, Dimon has said that he never met Epstein and didn’t know of him before his arrest in 2019. In 2023, JPMorgan Chase sued Staley, who left the bank in 2013, claiming that he had failed to disclose information about his relationship with Epstein. The case was later settled.

In the Labour Party and beyond, the revelation that Mandelson was scheming with Epstein to try to soften one of his own government’s policies generated outrage. “Advising a foreign bank to bully our chancellor in a time of financial crisis—it doesn’t get much lower than that,” Justin Madders, a Labour M.P., said. A Labour veteran who attended the meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party at which Starmer spoke last week told me, via e-mail, “haven’t been to such a big and highly charged one since TB”—Tony Blair—“came to persuade us of need to invade Iraq.”

The Epstein files suggest that the introduction of the bonus tax was far from the only occasion on which Mandelson updated Epstein on internal government deliberations or sent him confidential information. In June, 2009, Mandelson forwarded Epstein a memo from the Prime Minister’s office outlining twenty billion pounds in proposed government-asset sales, prompting Epstein to inquire about the nature of the assets. In March, 2010, Mandelson passed along a note about a meeting between Darling and Larry Summers, the former U.S. Treasury Secretary, which included a detailed discussion of the Volcker rule—a proposal to prohibit big U.S. banks from engaging in proprietary trading. At the time, big banks were worried about how the new rule would affect their operations and profitability. Mandelson apparently shared those concerns.

Another case of Mandelson disclosing sensitive information to Epstein came in May, 2010, as the Greek debt crisis was consuming Europe and financial markets were slumping. On the afternoon of Sunday, May 9th, Epstein wrote to Mandelson, “sources tell me 500 b euro bailout al=ost complete,” and Mandelson replied, “Sd be announced tonight.” The following day, after the announcement of a big rescue package, stock markets around the world shot up—raising the question of whether someone with advanced knowledge of the package could have profited from it.

Since the news of the police investigation, Mandelson hasn’t said anything publicly, and he couldn’t be reached for comment. BBC News reported that his “position is that he has not acted in any way criminally and that he was not motivated by financial gain.” Immediately after the e-mails were released, he defended his apparent efforts during the financial crisis to modify the tax on bankers’ bonuses. “My conversations in government at the time reflected the views of the sector as a whole, not a single individual,” he told the Financial Times. In his interview with the Times of London, Mandelson also dismissed suggestions that his actions had been influenced by payments that Epstein made to him and his partner, da Silva, including one to cover a course in osteopathy that da Silva took. “The idea that giving Reinaldo an osteopath bursary is going to sway mine or anyone else’s views about banking policy is risible,” Mandelson said.

If Mandelson was trying to sprinkle some of his old spin-doctor’s magic dust, it didn’t work. At Westminster, there is widespread agreement that this time his political downfall will be final. Gordon Brown, the man who returned him to high office in 2008, spoke for many when he wrote in the Guardian, “That a member of the cabinet at the time was thinking more of himself and his rich friends is a betrayal of everything we stand for as a country.” The former Prime Minister called for the establishment of an independent anti-corruption commission, “with the commissioner given the remit and power in law . . . to root out any criminality in UK political life by detecting and punishing it wherever and whenever it occurs.” That’s an ambitious aim. But, if the release of the Epstein files has accomplished anything, it’s been to demonstrate how, on both sides of the Atlantic, systems corrupted by money are ripe for reform. ♦

In the fall of 2016, President Barack Obama and his aides at the White House made plans for one last trip abroad, on Air Force One, to deliver a message in Greece about the origins and the persistence of democratic values. The trip was planned in a mood of confidence, even advance celebration. Hillary Clinton, Obama’s former Secretary of State and the Democratic nominee, would surely defeat Donald Trump, and Obama, who had won over an immense crowd in Berlin when he first ran for the White House, in 2008, would now have a valedictory moment near the Acropolis, where the ancient Greeks originated the business of self-rule. At least, that was the rosy view in the planning sessions.

The voters of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Florida, however (with an assist from James Comey and Clinton’s own stumbles), put an end to those plans. After Trump won the election, Obama agreed with aides who told him that to deliver the speech outdoors with the Acropolis as a backdrop would come off as grandiose and out of key with the moment. They moved the event to a more modest, less historically resonant venue—a cultural center in Athens. The content of the speech that Obama delivered was not greatly altered. But the context of the occasion had darkened considerably. In Athens, Obama spoke out in support of NATO and postwar alliances. He affirmed the ideals and the institutions of democratic rule: the separation of powers; an independent judiciary; freedom of speech and religion; a free press designed “to expose injustice and corruption”; free and fair elections; peaceful transitions of power. In the months and years that followed, Trump showed contempt for all of these. But, when Obama delivered the speech, few recognized the full extent of the emergency to come.

Recently, I’ve been revisiting that transitional moment—the passage from Obama to Trump—as I was provided early and exclusive access to a rich and fascinating oral-history project on the Obama Presidency conducted by Incite, a research institute at Columbia University. (The project, led by Columbia with contributions from the University of Chicago and the University of Hawaii, features hundreds of interviews with former Administration officials, advisers, activists, critics, artists, and ordinary people. It goes online on Tuesday, February 17th.)

One of the many interviews that caught my attention was with Terry Szuplat, a speechwriter who helped draft the Athens address. “He’s not trolling Trump,” Szuplat points out in an interview conducted over Zoom, during the pandemic. “What he’s doing, he’s laying down a marker of how democracies succeed, what’s required, what are the ingredients, the things that we’re going to have to defend in the coming years. He never once says Trump’s name.” The mood in the room in Athens was nonetheless sombre. Radical nationalism and populism were ascendant from Ankara to Moscow to Budapest. And now Trump was coming to power. “You could have heard a pin drop,” Szuplat said. “Those of us watching knew exactly what was going on and what we were listening to.”

Obama had started out, like so many, thinking that Trump was little more than a comical, if malevolent, real-estate hawker. Trump’s early and bellowing deployment of the racist “birther” theory gave Obama every reason to hate him; he chose, instead, to laugh at him. In January, 2016, Matt Lauer, then at NBC, asked Obama, “So, when you stand and deliver that State of the Union address, in no part of your mind and brain can you imagine Donald Trump standing up one day and delivering the State of the Union address?”

Obama laughed. “Well,” he said, “I can imagine it in a ‘Saturday Night’ skit.”

Even in the last days before the election, as the Clinton team faltered, Obama’s campaign guru David Plouffe still insisted that Clinton was a “one-hundred-per-cent” lock and instructed worrywarts to stop “wetting the bed.”

Like Plouffe, Obama proved to be a poor prognosticator. Not only did he (along with, in fairness, nearly everyone) fail to anticipate Trump’s victory, he failed to comprehend the degree to which Trump would, particularly in his second term, set out to demolish the principles and the institutions that Obama had defended in Athens. Obama met with Trump at the White House following the election, on November 10th. Not long afterward, Obama told me, in an interview in the Oval Office, “I don’t believe in apocalyptic—until the apocalypse comes. I think nothing is the end of the world until the end of the world.” In fact, he had told his staffers, who were stunned by Clinton’s loss, many of them weeping, that sometimes losing was the nature of democracy, that history does not move in straight lines.

“People were mired in despondency, and he thought part of his goal was to keep people pointed in the right direction,” David Axelrod, Obama’s senior adviser and political consultant, told me recently. “Our norms and institutions have proven more vulnerable to Trump’s assaults than President Obama imagined then.”

Obama told me at the time that he had accomplished “seventy or seventy-five per cent” of what he had set out to do, and that only fifteen or twenty per cent of what he had achieved would probably get “rolled back” by Trump. “But there’s still a lot of stuff that sticks.” This badly underestimated what was to come. Not only has Trump undermined government institutions and basic norms, he has, through his example, through his daily insults and his late-night social-media rants, normalized a level of racism, misogyny, and gratuitous division that cannot be calculated by percentages.

Here and there in the oral-history archive, people in the Obama circle refer to Trump’s racism, particularly the birther rhetoric that propelled his first campaign. Nearly a decade later, as I was watching and reading these interviews, the background noise was, as usual, incessant: there was Trump showering contempt on female reporters and sharing a racist video that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. This is such routine behavior from Trump that, as news stories, they pass quickly and, of course, with no apology.

Out of office, the Obamas have handled these grotesque insults differently. Michelle Obama harbors deep anger at Trump, according to knowledgeable sources, and has made it plain that she wants nothing to do with him. She believed that the birther rhetoric endangered her family, and things only got worse from there. As a matter of obligation, Obama is still capable of sitting next to Trump, as he did at Jimmy Carter’s funeral, last year, and exchanging pleasant banalities. When I raised this with two of Obama’s closest aides, Axelrod and Ben Rhodes, they both referred to the analogous predicament of Jackie Robinson, who was the first Black player in modern major-league baseball, and who made it a matter of principle to endure and absorb every slur with an almost superhuman dignity. The pathfinder’s predicament. In private, Obama usually does not lash out angrily about the Trumpism of the day—that is not his temperament—but he will routinely ask people to imagine the response if he had been the one to, say, rage-post hateful videos at 2 A.M. or use his office to enrich his family by billions of dollars.

Often, Obama will ignore Trump’s daily offenses. When he finally reacted to the racist ape video, as he did on Brian Tyler Cohen’s podcast the other day, he did so with a formal, almost serene calm that stands outside the fevers of the political moment. “You know, it is true that it gets attention,” he began. “But you know, as I’m travelling around the country, as you’re travelling around the country, you meet people. They still believe in decency, courtesy, kindness. And there’s this sort of clown show that’s happening in social media and on television,” he went on. “And what is true is that there doesn’t seem to be any shame about this among people who used to feel like you had to have some decorum. And a sense of propriety and respect for the office, right? So that’s been lost.”

Obama’s posture toward Trump’s outrages is not a façade. As was the case with Robinson, his carriage is a matter of both discipline and principle. In a speech, Obama is perfectly capable of slamming Trump—many wonder why he does not do it far more often, considering the nature of the ongoing crisis—but he will not alter his nature.

“Look, by dint of biography, by dint of experience, the basic optimism that I articulate and present publicly as President is real,” he told me after his 2016 meeting with Trump. “It’s what I teach my daughters. It is how I interact with my friends and with strangers. I genuinely do not assume the worst, because I’ve seen the best so often. So, it is a mistake that I think people have sometimes made to think that I’m just constantly biting my tongue and there’s this sort of roiling anger underneath the calm Hawaiian exterior. I’m not that good of an actor. I was born to a white mother, raised by a white mom and grandparents who loved me deeply. I’ve had extraordinarily close relationships with friends that have lasted decades. I was elected twice by the majority of the American people. Every day, I interact with people of good will everywhere.”

In Athens, Obama made his speech at an ordinary hall, but still had occasion to visit the Acropolis. “There was something haunting about that,” Rhodes told me. “It was emptied of tourists for security reasons, and for Obama, given his kind of Buddhist nature, the persistence of this ancient place was a reminder of how temporary everything, like a particular leader, is. It was reassuring to him. Trump was elected, but democracy has been around for thousands of years. Obama actually thinks like that. So he took some solace in that.” ♦

A little more than a year ago, after running a successful pop-up called Ha’s Đặc Biệt, the chefs Sadie Mae Burns and Anthony Ha opened Ha’s Snack Bar, an itsy-bitsy restaurant on the Lower East Side. The Snack Bar, like the pop-up, served Vietnamese-inspired dishes that were clever, cheffy (and more than a bit French-inflected), and utterly cool without any sort of hauteur. From just about the instant it opened, the place became a monstrous hit—dramatically, fervidly, almost disorientingly. Enormous crowds gathered outside the Broome Street storefront in the hope of being chosen to occupy a spare stool. Social media was relentless, traditional media breathless. (When Burns and Ha learned, around this time last year, that I would be reviewing the Snack Bar, they very politely reached out to ask if I could please not.) Still, from the beginning, they were clear that the Snack Bar was just a first step on their brick-and-mortar journey—not their “real” restaurant, as such, but a staging ground from which to figure out a grander opening to come. Now, exactly twelve months later, they’ve opened Bistrot Ha, just around the corner.

The new place is small, by most measures, though vastly larger than the Snack Bar, with a dozen marble-topped tables that tend to be populated by interesting-looking people wearing blunt bobs and enviable knitwear. As at Ha’s Snack Bar, the food is an elegant wallop of neon flavors, foregrounding the punctilious greenness of Vietnamese herbs and the languorous funk of organ meats and offcuts, but now there’s room to breathe, to relax a little, to take it all in, to linger. There’s a neat stainless-steel bar running along one wall at which you could, in theory, nurse a glass of some minerally Old World red, or a ballet-pink lychee cosmo, though for the moment its seats are all given over to diners having a full meal. There’s even a coat check, by Jove! And unlike the Snack Bar, whose alcove-like kitchen runs on just a hot plate and an electric oven, Bistrot Ha has a more built-out setup, allowing Ha and Burns to sear and broil and finish dishes à la minute to their hearts’ content. The relationship between the two spaces reminds me of the way chic Parisian restaurants sometimes operate accessory caves à vin—more casual wine bars, often sharing the same kitchen but serving noshier food. One Burns-Ha restaurant is a snack bar, and the other’s a bistro(t), and the existence of each allows the other to be more unadulteratedly itself.

The chefs Anthony Ha and Sadie Mae Burns.

One of my favorite Bistrot dishes—braised leeks standing upright in a sauce gribiche so chunky that it’s nearly egg salad—was also one of the best I had on my first visit to the Snack Bar, though the columns of leek have been updated with a finial of marinated mussels. A pho-spiced French-onion soup that I saw on the menu at the Bistrot one week was, by the next, moved around the corner to the Snack Bar. Burns explained to me, on the phone, that the dish just felt more right there, and I don’t know exactly why, but I get it completely. They’ve ported over, in the opposite direction, their signature vol-au-vent, which was once the centerpiece of the Snack Bar menu but is much more at home in the romantic light of the Bistrot. It involves a buttery bowl of puff pastry filled with an ever-changing array of fricassées; I relished one with tender hunks of stewed lamb shoulder in a grass-green sauce made of lime leaf and mint, equally reminiscent of British Sunday roasts and South Asian braises, though, another time, the pastry contained a take on shaking beef (a Vietnamese stir-fry also known as bò lúc lắc), with chewy steak and bits of onion, evocative mostly of week-night takeout.

The daily specials tend to take the form of big hunks of meat—a mammoth pork chop one evening, strewn, Portuguese-ishly, with clams; a brawny steak another, sized to feed two or three. I don’t think you’d be unhappy if you ordered them, but main courses of that scale tend to hog the spotlight (not to mention diners’ stomach space), and it would be such a sadness to miss out on the chance to sample the rest of the menu, with all its wit and weirdness. Burns and Ha play, so warmly, with reference, synthesizing and hybridizing: take the winky General Ha’s Fried Pig Trotter, featuring two marshmallow-soft pillows of meat and fat and connective tissue inside a crispy exterior, doused in an awfully familiar tart, ketchupy, sugary glaze. In their idiosyncratic take on tuna carpaccio, the paillettes of raw fish are sliced considerably thicker than you might expect so that the seafood’s sweet salinity isn’t lost against a sticky-sweet sauce sharpened with fiery slivers of pickled pepper. Vitello tonnato, a famously understated dish of cold meat under a silken sauce made from tuna, gets audaciously remade with paper-thin slices of pork loin, finished with a dark swirl of chile crisp so spicy it brought tears to my eyes. Some dishes were less swaggering but no less appealing: the savoy-cabbage wrapping of a domelike chou farci was filled with a boudin-meets-lion’s-head-meatballs mixture of pork and shrimp and rice, which had an almost maternal softness, its gentle flavors coaxed just to brightness by a spiced broth ladled over top.

Bistrot Ha is small by most measures, with a dozen tables and a bar along one wall.

The menu at Bistrot Ha changes weekly, at minimum, reflecting Burns and Ha’s restless “both and” approach to cooking. The duo has drawn inspiration for Bistrot Ha from Paris’s legendary Bistrot Paul Bert, which once upon a time hosted a pop-up of Ha’s Đặc Biệt. There’s a characteristic nonchalance, a well-earned confidence in the restaurant’s power to delight. I loved an appetizer of fried sheets of yuba layered, napoleon-like, with a tangy paste of shrimp and spices, and soaked in fish sauce; its interleaving of flavors and techniques seemed to harmonize with the dessert menu’s dramatic ice-cream bombe, a spherical Baked Alaska featuring assorted strata of glacés, sherbets, and sorbets (ginger and lime leaf, on a recent visit) under pointy peaks of gooey torched meringue.

I swung by the Snack Bar a few days ago and was surprised to note that, though it’s still plenty packed, it isn’t quite the mob scene it once was. Burns and Ha have removed some of the table seating, to allow for more bodies in the room, and to play up the snacky vibe. All fevers break eventually; what used to be a frenzy seems to have settled into something more sustainable, more livable. What’s here, and there—at the Bistrot and at the Snack Bar—feels better, richer, more humane. On the menu at both restaurants is Ha’s rustic pâté, served by the slice, each piece dotted with white bits of lardo and topped with fat raisins plumped up in a vinegary, fish-sauce-spiked agrodolce. The dish is ostensibly an interpretation of mắm chưng, a steamed Vietnamese meat loaf made with pork and fermented fish, though to tell the truth I couldn’t pick up anything besides a very French pâté de campagne. Still, it’s a marvellous piece of work: dense and jiggly and alive with spices, just as at home on the marble tabletops of the Bistrot as it is on the narrow counters of the Snack Bar. The pâté, like many of Bistrot Ha’s dishes, is served with a wedge of baguette so airy and crackly that I was shocked to learn it’s the same Balthazar Bakery loaf I pick up regularly from my local grocery store. Context, it turns out, is everything. ♦